Why Are Food Stamps Kept in the National Numismatic Collection?

By Karen Lee

My first experience with food stamps was as a kid, growing up in Peekskill, New York.
In the grocery store, my mother would give my sister and me the
glance, which meant not to stare at the people in front of us, who were
ripping coupons from booklets to pay for their food. I remember feeling
like we were expected to help them keep a secret -- that some people
couldn't pay cash for their food. This raft of memories unexpectedly
floated up when I helped the Smithsonian bring a collection of food stamps into the National Numismatic Collection.

This time, rather than helping to protect a secret, the National
Museum of American History is celebrating these ingenious slips of paper
and the system of emergency currency they represent. Numismatically speaking, food stamps are remarkable. They tell us a story about the most
ambitious system of food aid ever created by any government, anywhere.

They were money: printed by the Bureau of Printing and
Engraving and backed by the Federal Government. But unlike the green
dollars some of us still prefer to use instead of a debit card, food stamps were intended to be a single-use medium of exchange. After they
did their job enabling a hungry person to go home with food, the store
had to send them back to the government, where they would be counted and
cancelled. Grocery store merchants got reimbursed in real dollars for
each food stamp dollar they turned in.

But the story didn't end there. Food stamp purchases could not be
accurately completed without a mechanism for making small change. Think
about it. I use a $5 coupon to make a $4.50 purchase. The cashier can't,
by government order, give me back 50 cents. Some genius (or perhaps an
avid Monopoly game fan?) invents change chits. Individual grocery stores
were responsible for creating their own change and we've collected
quite an informative array of them -- tokens, printed pieces of colored
construction paper, and other printed items which not only served as
change but reminded the user where they came from. Change from Mike's
Meat Market could not be used at the Safeway grocery store. This gives
new meaning to the concept of a change jar, and users of food stamps
were expected to keep a multitude of change chits organized for future
use.

In addition to this array of food stamps and change chits, we also collected some
of the technology used for printing the coupons (including unadopted
designs) and Electronic Benefit Transfer cards that let people pay
without fumbling through coupon books.

This post also appears on the Smithsonian's O Say Can You See? blog, an Atlantic partner site.